Category: reflection

Photo by /\/\ichael Patric|{

Muni rider Charles alerted us to a recent study which lead Yale sociologist Esther Kim to establish the rules for avoiding strangers on public transportation. Color us intrigued.

Kim’s totally unsocial rules:

• Avoid eye contact.
• Lean against the window and stretch out your legs.
• Sit on the aisle seat and listen to music to pretend not to hear people asking for the window seat.
• Place a large bag or multiple items in the empty seat to make it time-consuming to move.
• Look out the window with a blank stare to appear crazy.
• Pretend to be asleep.
• Put your coat on the seat to make it appear already taken.
• If all else fails, lie: Say the seat has been taken by someone else.

While much of Kim’s research was done on long-distance bus rides, some of the same conditions apply to intra-city travel. And this rang all sorts of bells for us:

Kim found that the greatest unspoken rule of bus travel is that if other seats are available you shouldn’t sit next to someone else. As the passengers claimed, “It makes you look weird.”

Read more about Kim’s work, including what people tend to do when drivers announce a full bus, here.

How do you handle strangers on Muni and BART?